9 - The Provocateur as Decolonial Praxis

Summary

Introduction

Racism continues to be a societal burden in Australia that I have learned to carry – that gaze wrapped up in judgement from a white society and white individuals. It manifests in everyday educational environments, including in my work as an Aboriginal artist- academic- activist. Aboriginal art and politics have had an uneasy relationship in this country. The one-sided colonial narrative continues to silence Aboriginal voices and has far-reaching collateral damage from the academy to wider Australian society. My platform for disrupting the colonial narrative and decolonizing the histories of Queensland is through the visual arts. In this chapter, I reflect on my experiences teaching creative arts in Australian and American universities through engaging two of my artworks, Annihilation of the Blacks (Foley, 1986) and HHH (Hedonistic Honky Haters) I (Foley, 2004). I engage these artworks to provoke conversations about race and racism, and to explore the legacies of racial superiority. The provocateur as decolonial praxis makes many students and colleagues feel uncomfortable. I argue that critical provocation in teaching is vital and needs to move students and colleagues beyond ‘feeling uncomfortable’ in Australia, where denial is a key feature of racism. ‘The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can better transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled’ (Freire, 2017: 13).

Australian higher education teaching is a highly racialized space for an Aboriginal academic. For most of my art praxis, I’ve worked alongside universities and within them. I have held two appointments as adjunct professor at the University of Queensland (2011– 17) and Griffith University (2003– 9), given numerous guest lectures and been a member on staff at each. I’ve never felt embedded or a sense of belonging in these spaces, but have operated on my own terms largely in the margins through ‘research-creation’ (Loveless, 2020: xxiv). Unravelling over time, this has been a trajectory where I’ve learnt to weave my way around conservative restraints of institutional power. In the process, my weaving around power, refusal, resistance and operating at the margins deploying art as critical praxis have lent themselves to developing critical racial and decolonial literacies for students and academics.